Two days after Republicans dominated elections nationwide, House Speaker John Boehner warned President Obama to drop his plans to use executive authority to curb deportations of illegal immigrants.
“If he continues to go down this path of taking action on his own, it’s inviting big trouble,” Boehner said.
The Ohio Republican met with reporters one day ahead of a scheduled White House meeting between Obama and congressional leaders.
Republicans are likely to use the meeting to ask Obama about his plans to halt deportations and perhaps make it easier for illegal immigrants to come to the United States and obtain work permits.
Obama said Wednesday he will act soon to make changes to the nation’s immigration policies, blaming Congress for not passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would have legalized millions of immigrants already living here.
But Boehner said such a move would make it impossible for Congress to ever act on a comprehensive measure.
“He’ll poison the well,” Boehner told reporters in his first post-election press conference. “And there will be no chance of immigration reform moving in this Congress.”
Boehner likened Obama’s planned move to playing with matches, warning, “He’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.”
House Republicans are poised to have their largest majority since before World War II.
In the Senate, voters picked Republicans to fill seven seats previously held by Democrats, giving the GOP the majority for the first time since 2006.
Boehner said the nation signaled in Tuesday’s election that they oppose the president’s plan to take executive action on immigration policy.
Voters, Boehner said, “don’t want the president to act on a unilateral basis.”
Boehner and incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday outlining an agenda that focuses on jobs, the economy, tax reform, energy production and repealing onerous regulations and laws, including parts of Obamacare.
Boehner said he “couldn’t ask for a better partner” than McConnell to implement a new congressional agenda.
Boehner, a staunch opponent of Obamacare, said the House will vote to repeal the law, as it has done in the past, but it’s not clear whether Republicans can come up with the votes in the Senate, where 60 votes would likely be needed to clear the bill for the president’s desk.
In that case, Boehner said, Republicans would move to strip out the provisions that are onerous to both parties, such as the law defining a full-time work week as 30 hours, and the individual mandate to purchase health insurance.
“There are bipartisan majorities in both the House and the Senate to take these issues out of Obamacare,” Boehner said. “We need to put them on the president’s desk and let him choose.”
